Re: number substitution puzzle

I think he means that.

add together the three words below

I am assuming he wants the first three words summed to get the fourth.

Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is forever dead.Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and PunishmentThe knowledge of some things as a function of age is a delta function.

Re: number substitution puzzle

Yes, they are common but they are rarely solved on math forums, They are called alphametics or cryptarithms.

The algorithms range from brute force to implementing the same tricks a human problem solver uses. There are some fairly obvious moves.

For modern machines brute force does well on this small problem. No matter how tough the problem is you always have less than 10! possibilities. Even using a slow language that will not take very long.

Canonically, I don't know of any 'short cuts' for problems such as this. In general it's just trial-and-error along with some deductive elimination and a lot of branch-and-bound search.

As for a math way? I tend to doubt that math is the right tool here. You can play around with diophantine equations or generating functions or both but it still looks like a programming task rather than a mathematical one.

Re: number substitution puzzle

Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is forever dead.Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and PunishmentThe knowledge of some things as a function of age is a delta function.

Re: number substitution puzzle

Sorry, had a labeling problem.

Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is forever dead.Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and PunishmentThe knowledge of some things as a function of age is a delta function.